It's taken far longer than most anyone would have estimated, but it looks like things may finally be getting close for the mainlining of OpenMP within the LLVM Clang compiler. The good news is that Intel developers have already been working on OpenMP 4.0 support for Clang.

I've been talking about OpenMP for Clang for two years and longer now, but support for this parallel programming standard for C and Fortran has yet to land. Even with the upcoming release of LLVM 3.4, support for OpenMP is absent.

Andrey Bokhanko of Intel's compiler team wrote a status update this morning on the LLVM mailing list:

- ANL and PathScale have re-based the OpenMP support from Clang 3.3 to now running off the latest Clang development code.

- The OpenMP Consortium is acknowledging the Clang work on supporting this standard.

- An Intel developer gave a talk about OpenMP in Clang/LLVM at the recent SC13 conference.

- Intel has contributed support for the OMP SIMD pragma, OMP declare reduction pragma, and proc_bind clause support for Clang. These OpenMP features are part of the OpenMP 4.0 standard. Another Intel developer also worked on support for variable length arrays for OpenMP construct.s

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

The mission at Phoronix since 2004 has centered around enriching the Linux hardware experience. In addition to supporting our site through advertisements, you can help by subscribing to Phoronix Premium. You can also use our Amazon.com shopping link when making online purchases or contribute to Phoronix through a PayPal tip or Bitcoin.